The author wants to know if the film version of her best-selling novel “Me Before You” brought this viewer to tears.

It’s a reasonable question: Her book, a love story about a young wheelchair-bound man who falls for his caregiver, has emotionally devastated some 6 million readers. So Moyes hopes the movie version, which stars Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin, is having the same impact.

“I’ve been standing in the back of the theater during screenings, waiting to see who’s sniffling,” says Moyes, 46, in a phone interview from her home in Essex, England. “If it’s not 70 percent or above, I’m not pleased.”

Moyes has a lot invested in this film. Not only did she write the screenplay — her first — but she also had been trying for years to get a film adaptation of the 2012 book made.

After its initial publication in Britain, the movie rights were snatched up almost immediately. Everything was on track until she got a call informing her that a French picture called “The Intouchables” — about a wealthy quadriplegic who strikes up an unlikely friendship with his live-in caregiver — was also in the works.

“The distributors of my film pulled out because they said there can’t be two films about quadriplegics,” Moyes recalls. “I was gutted.”

Fortunately, things turned around pretty quickly. When “Me Before You” was published in the U.S. in January 2013, the New York Times Sunday Book Review gave the novel a rave review. Suddenly, Moyes got calls from a dozen producers interested in turning her book into a movie.

She went with Warner Bros. (which released the film June 3). And Karen Rosenfelt, a producer on the project, asked Moyes if she ever had considered writing the screenplay herself — a prospect the writer had assumed “would be the studio’s worst nightmare.”

So she began to toy with the idea, giving herself a crash course in screenwriting by going online and reading the scripts of all the films she loved — everything from “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” to “Alien.”

Her varied writing background helped, too. Not only had Moyes published almost a dozen books at the time, but she’d also spent years working as a journalist. Until 2000, Moyes was a reporter at the British newspaper the Independent, where she’d covered the death of Princess Diana and sectarian violence in Belfast.

“I ended up loving the (filmmaking) process and went on set every day,” says Moyes, who is married to a journalist and has three children. “My favorite thing was punching up the scenes with the director. It was a bit like being in a newsroom, with all the adrenaline and camaraderie.”

Moyes took to screenwriting so well that she already has adapted another of her novels, “One Plus One.” It’s “far scarier,” she says, to release a movie than a book. Fans have expectations, there’s more money at stake and, of course, at least 70 percent of the audience has to cry.

“This book — more than any of my books — is important to me because it’s the book that changed my life,” she says. “And I’m the parent of a disabled child.

“What I want to convey with the story is that a disability is the least important part of a person. You can fall in love with them, be irritated by them, laugh with them. What someone is physically able to do should be unimportant.”